Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Criticism

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Jones, Franklin P.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

10.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

11.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

13.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

14.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

17.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

18.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

19.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

20.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

21.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

22.

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Fielding, Henry

23.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

24.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

25.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

26.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

27.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

28.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

29.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

30.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

31.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

34.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

36.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

37.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

38.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

39.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

41.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

42.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

43.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

44.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

46.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.